Word: absurdistly
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Since his subject matter is as alienated as any collection of Absurdist heroes, Wolfe feels he must over compensate to some degree in the interests of objectivity. "If I don't tip the scales a little bit," he says, "it will sound like I'm making fun of them". Sometimes, in Wolfe's description, these drop out forms seem as natural and organic a part of the contemporary scene as any aspect of that Mom's pie America which he dismisses like a crumb from his roll-away sleeve. At other moments, however, they resemble isolated islands of vitality just...
What Playwright Schisgal has done is to turn the theater of the absurd upside down. Absurdist plays customarily use laughter to evoke despair. Schisgal uses the histrionic pretentions of despair to provoke laughter. Immeasurable credit is due Director Mike Nichols for keeping the pace on the wing and inventing cleverly apposite bits of business. One dry jump and three wet ones are taken off the bridge, all with acrobatic finesse. The performances of Wallach, Jackson, and Arkin are models of comic acting, perfect in control and timing, flawless in witty inflection of the lines...
...with a quivering sense of present-day life. The wave of off-Broadway excitement and support for such playwrights as Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape) and Genet (The Balcony) made possible the precarious on-Broadway beachheads of Pinter (The Caretaker) and Ionesco (Rhinoceros). Genet, who is less an absurdist than a perversely erotic symbolist poet of the theater, is a perfect example of the kind of playwright Broadway will still not touch, to its considerable loss. His The Blacks, now well over the 700 mark in performances, is probably the most satisfying work of art ever produced...
This ham-and-existentialist Zenwich put together by a young American absurdist named Jack Gelber and first served in an off-Broadway theater, was eagerly gobbed up by sensation-hungry hundreds of let's -go-down-to-the-Villagers. But what was fundamentally wrong with the play remains fundamentally wrong in the film it is not life, it is not art, it is not interesting. Philosophically, it is an uninspired restatement of Waiting for Godot; esthetically, it is just a drop in the Beckett...
Marx Bros. Plus Myths. After Beckett, the absurdist message is crystallized: life is a tragic farce. The absurdist reasoning goes like this: death makes any act of life futile, hence farcical, the funny side of absurdity. But if "God is dead," as Nietzsche proclaimed and the theater of the absurd assumes, then the universe itself is senseless, the tragic side of absurdity. For all their bravado, the playwrights of the absurd are inconsolable at the vision of a godless universe, but they regard their audiences as complacent, apathetic, asleep. With taunts and shock effects, by continually destroying illusion to remind...